


Fall Out Boy: Live In Tokyo

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Clubbing, M/M, Mania, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of the Best Buy Incident, Pre-hiatus, Tales from 2008ish, Tokyo - Freeform, Touring, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 04:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10677618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Pete goes off his meds in Tokyo. The whole city is neon, glitter, and spin. He takes Patrick by the hand. They run away into the night.For Bandom Bingo 2017: broken promises.





	Fall Out Boy: Live In Tokyo

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to steal [objectlesson's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson) style for this one. She is the genius who started writing fic in second person and everyone should worship her accordingly.
> 
> I definitely listened to a J Pop playlist while I wrote this, and it enhanced my experience. This was a lot of fun for me. I hope you like it too!

 

__

 

_“We are symbolic. We are driving to the edge of the city and talking in vague-yet-resolute certainties about our dreams and our futures. We are leaving certain things in the medicine cabinet. We are falling in love.”_

 

 

Lithium, Ativan, Lexapro. 3, 2, 1. You count them out for no good reason. Not like the number’s changing. 29 in each bottle yesterday, 29 in each bottle today.

You handle the bottles. They rattle and clack. To be thorough, you cup your hands under the faucet, fill them up. Slurp, gulp, swallow. Tap water dribbles on your chin.

You dry your hands.

You put the bottles away.

The thing is, scared and poisoned as you were that night, you remember what you promised. You remember your first lie to Patrick Stump. You held his hands, your wrist scraped tender by your plastic ID bracelet, and you fucking swore you’d never go off your meds again.

He was so angry with you. You loved him so much. There’s nothing you wouldn’t have promised.

Today you feel good. Vivid, alive. Slightly crunchy with jet lag, but not tired. You’ve never actually been to Japan before. The last time your band came, it was without you.

You flushed your next two months of refills down the toilet before you boarded the plane. Don’t tell Patrick, but it’s been a while. Five weeks to the day and you’re doing just fine. Better than fine. You don’t want to jinx it, but you think you’re falling in love.

Today you feel like you can do anything.

Patrick is balled up and pretending to be unconscious in the room’s second queen bed. You throw open the blinds because it feels like morning; the neon glow of midnight Tokyo shines back.

It’s its own kind of sunrise. Patrick won’t want to miss it. The air in this room tastes as stale as the plane. It’s your first day on this continent. You itch to be out in the night.

You throw yourself full-force onto Patrick’s bed. Just in case the bounce doesn’t dislodge him from near-sleep, you also hiss loudly, “Rickster! You awake? I can’t sleep.”

Patrick’s voice comes from deep within the comforter. “Did you even try? Take an Ambien or something.”

You fight the urge to laugh, to tell him you dropped them one-by-one out the car window on the way to O’Hare 30 hours ago—a trail of breadcrumbs to help you find your way back home. Patrick will not care for that information. He will not see the charm.

Sometimes you think Patrick has a pathological inability to see the charm in things. The world brims with magic. You just want to show it to him.

Starting with Tokyo. Tonight.

You already know the best way to get Patrick out of bed: it’s you, getting into it. You slither under the comforter and seek Patrick-tummy with your cold feet. Twenty seconds later your favorite human is on his feet, by all appearances wide awake, scowling down at you.

But it’s worth it, because 20 minutes after that, your favorite human is standing next to you on the densely packed, brightly lit streets of Shinjuku. J-poppy house music filters out from somewhere, giving the crowd an external heartbeat. Locals on bicycles and tourists with cameras and drunk Japanese kids in love with themselves and their friends and their futures: people are all around you. The air tingles and aches at once. This is _exactly_ where you were meant to be.

You grab Patrick’s hand and he doesn’t stop you. “Still wish you were rooming with Joe?” you tease.

“Yes,” Patrick says immediately, but his eyes shine with reflected neon. His smile tells the truth.

You drag Patrick to Ni-Chrome, the densely packed gay nightclub district you read about online. No hidden agendas here. You’ve always been passionate about sightseeing. A mishmash of kanji and English shines in the full rainbow, advertising more niches of queerness than you’ve ever found in LA: debu-sen, gai-sen, fuke-sen, kuma-sen. Skinny boys with huge pastel updos stalk past, giraffe-like on 6-inch heels and squeaky with rubber Lolita skirts; gaggles of girls in with hands held like daisy chains wend around him. Couples of every imagined combination embrace passionately on these vivid streets. Everything is well-lit and clean.

You notice it, each time Patrick does not retract his hand. He is being very patient with you, maybe. Or maybe this is exactly where he wants to be. Maybe he hoped you’d wake him.

You eat sashimi in a noisy café, down glowing drinks at a walk-up mixology counter, venture into tiny dark bars that each cater to a specific sexual niche and drink sake and plum wine at the ones that don’t turn you away. Strangers keep sending Patrick drinks. Obviously, he is everyone’s type. He lets you put his arm around him.

The night whirls around you like a merry-go-round. You walk past hospital-neat porn shops; polite, illuminated displays of fetish wear; cozy-looking gay bookstores postered with gleaming male torsos, suggestively unbuttoned pants. Patrick’s laughter sounds like starlight.

The two of you end up at an open-air club called Dragon Men. Once you see its lit-up sign, you know this is where the night has been sending you. Every decision you make as an echo, fate falling into place as you walk the path it laid for you. You find a table next to an ornate, tastefully phallic fountain. Patrick allows you to buy him a drink.

You are not falling in love just once, no. You are falling love again and again and again, at least one time each moment.

“We’re limitless. We’re never gonna die,” you tell Patrick. “Two kids from Chicago and look where we are now! This night is ours, Pat. We can do anything. Name it, and I’ll give it to you.”

Patrick is, you’re quite sure, blushing, somewhere in all the blue light and shadow from his omnipresent hat. “Let’s break into the Imperial Palace,” he suggests. “You can steal me the crown jewels?”

It’s not what you had in mind, but it sounds like an adventure anyway. “Anything,” you repeat. You jump out of your chair—the more the night seeps into your skin, the more the neon gets in your bones, the harder and harder it is to sit still. “Let’s go!”

Patrick takes your hand, laughing, and lets you pull him out of his seat. “Pete, wait!” he says. “What’s gotten into you? International jewel theft can wait til I finish my drink.”

You dart back to the table, collect Patrick’s drink, press it into his hand. Then, because you’re both on your feet and the night is alive and J-pop moves with the blood in your veins, because you’re young enough and so in love you might rupture and people are dancing already around you, because there are lanterns strung up above your heads and stars above that and everything is washed in a sparkling Tokyo glow—because no better reason than you want to, you pull Patrick close and say into his ear, “Can you drink while you dance?”

It turns out he Patrick can. You don’t notice when exactly his drink vanishes, but after a song or two both his hands are on your hips, your bodies are sweaty and close, you are moving in the current of other bodies around you and trusting the music to keep you in sync. You are the only two people on the planet who are real, you think to yourself. Everything else is just—an elaborate backdrop. The universe is a spotlight and it’s fixed on you. The two of you.

Everything feels so _meant_ , so intentional, in that moment—like the camera’s zooming out and you can comprehend the grand, intricate design of it all. It’s almost painful, the weight of the whole world and all its history, culminating in this moment and resting on you. The two of you.

Time speeds up, faster and faster. Your thoughts crash into you, reverberate to your core. They start to sliptripspeed past quicker than you can even really think them, a silver muddle and flash, a thread of racing salmon throwing themselves upstream. You’re out of breath. You’re moving so fast that the pressure on your lungs stops them expanding. You’re moving so fast your own velocity tears the air away from your lips. Still, still, even at this speed the world whips past you.

You have not slept in five days.

All you can do is dance. You throw yourself into the movement, the motion, your body. His body. Your two bodies. You feel you must dance. You don’t know what will happen if you stop. You begin to fear it. Deep in your gut, something wormy turns over. The neon around you swirls faster and faster. The idea of dragon men, here among the crowd, grows ever more menacing. It’s not fun, it’s not fun anymore. You hold on to Patrick. All you can do is hold on.

Your skin is translucent. The whole club can see what’s inside of you. Patrick feels your heartbeat speed, your skin slick up with sweat. His lips move in the damp of your neck. You listen hard, thinking he’s about to speak. Then you feel his tongue. You realize he is kissing you. Kissing your neck like he can’t help himself.

You have felt that way about Patrick for—years. You have kissed his neck more times than you can count. Patrick kissing your neck, though—this is new. His lips are burning out your nerve endings faster than you can replace them. You’re pretty sure you can feel the smoke. You can feel—you can feel—

Everything.

You turn his head with your hands, rougher than you meant to, in a hurry because the world is ending or you’re ascending or this is the fucking rapture and there’s not much _time_. In a nightclub in Tokyo, under the eye of the heavens and anyone else who cares to see, you kiss Patrick Stump on the mouth.

Patrick kisses you back.

It’s too much. It’s drowning. It’s an explosion played backwards, a furious burning burst of shrapnel bound up into a single supernova coal and shoved into your chest.

It feels so, so good to burn. You’re so happy-scared-invincible you don’t know what you are. You feel endless, infinite. You hope the kiss is too. You kiss him harder, deeper, trusting that you do not need to breathe. Patrick is better, more necessary to your survival, than oxygen ever was.

What you feel—you need to express it with more of your body. You need him more than you’ve ever needed anything, all your ramping fear transmuted into clawing desire. Sparks shoot up all around you. “Patrick, I want you,” you gasp into his lips. The words leave your mouth serrated, your voice torn raw like you’ve been screaming. You can’t say for sure you haven’t. The merry-go-round is less and less merry, more and more foreboding. The earth spins like a fucking tilt-o-whirl and there’s no way off.

One way. There’s one way off. You buck your hips against Patrick, just in case he missed the improbable heat of your erection there. The opposite of what you want happens. Patrick leans back, looks into your eyes. Your eyes are all pupil, you know. Your eyes are streaming with starlight. He won’t see anything in them he likes. The whole of the cosmos itches against the stitches in your skin. You need, you _need_ , to bleed through. You need to sweat and sin the excess away, before it all tears you apart.

Patrick’s body. You need to pour it into Patrick’s body. You are a swollen creature of want, want, _want_.

“Are you okay?” Patrick asks. You hate these words. They are paltry and they are feeble, unworthy to be cast at your feet. Godhood rips through you, gnashing its teeth, its vile skeleton shifting and stabbing beneath your skin.

“I will be,” you say. You have a plan. You know what will fix this dizzy too-much gnawing void, a hungry monster crouched in your chest devouring you from the inside out. “Let’s fuck in the bathroom,” you say. He tries to recoil and you catch his hands, hold them tightly. “Please.” Your voice does not sound like your voice. Your skin does not feel like your skin. You need, need, need him. You are pouring out. You need someone to scoop you back in.

“You’re not acting like yourself,” Patrick says. His face, rosy-flushed with drinking and dancing and kissing, goes dark. It’s like every light in the city going out at once. A moment ago you thought the lights were too much, busy buzzing bright, but now you realize you hate the dark.

You try to kiss Patrick again, to bring the sun out again—the one that shines out Patrick’s chestchinfingertips—but Patrick steps back, out of your reach. The face he’s making is not a good one. You don’t understand what’s changed, what’s gone wrong. You can see the strings, the glowing gauzy paths of cause to effect and back again. You can reach out and rearrange them, pluck away the consequences you do not care for, reconnect whatever dots you desire. But there are no strings coming off Patrick. You have no control over Patrick. You do not understand Patrick.

The words that come out of Patrick’s mouth next are bad ones.  He says, “Have you been taking your meds?”

Your pills are—fuck, in the hotel and in the plumbing and littering the streets of Chicago. Nowhere they can help you. You mouth is bitter with the aftertaste of chemical restraints. You don’t want them. You want Patrick. Patrick will make the world stop. Patrick will still the spinning.

The more you reach for him, the more he goes away. The more he leaves you behind. His face is closing. Possibility turns to ash, staining the night around you.

You do not want to lie to Patrick again. Distantly, you think, _Just fix it. You can rewrite it later._ You open your mouth to say whatever is convenient, trusting reality to ripple out from your words and remake itself accordingly, but Patrick interrupts whatever spell you might have spoken.

Patrick says, “Pete, you promised.”

“Lithium, Ativan, Lexapro,” you say. “3, 2, 1. Blast-off.” You bite your lip. The copper burst of your own blood steadies you. It feels nutritious and wholesome to consume the product of your own body. You are glad the blood beneath the skin is not going to waste.

Patrick has returned again, just when he was reaching escape velocity and about to leave you in your cold and lonely orbit. His hands are on your shoulders now. The heat and the passion, the exploration and the wanting of his earlier touch—it’s all gone. His hands are just hands. They want nothing of you. They offer no absolutions. They work no transformations.

“What are you saying?” He asks it gently. It curdles in your gut. Gentleness you do not deserve. Of this you are absolutely certain.

The words come out a whisper. “I broke that promise,” you say.

You know Patrick must be angry. Patrick’s always angry, and now you’ve lied to him. You perceive with abrupt clarity: you are the worst person ever to live. But Patrick’s face goes soft, caving in like you’ve struck it. There is no anger there. “Oh, Pete,” is all he says.

Patrick takes you in his arms. Patrick takes you home.

 

Lithium, Ativan, Lexapro. 3, 2, 1. You count them out and place them on your tongue, marking the way the number’s changing. 29 in each bottle yesterday, 28 in each bottle today.

You handle the bottles. They rattle and clack. To help you swallow, you cup your hands under the faucet, fill them up. Slurp, gulp, swallow. Tap water dribbles on your chin.

You dry your hands.

You put the bottles away.

The thing is, powerful and alive as you were last night, you remember what you promised. You remember your vow to Patrick Stump. You held his hands, your palms sweaty from dancing and the screaming spin of the galaxy, and you fucking swore you’d take your meds for the rest of the tour, and talk to your doctor when you got home about not wanting to take them anymore.

If you keep this promise, Patrick says, there’s no reason you can’t kiss him again.

He said he was proud of you. You love him so much. There’s so much more you hope he will let you promise.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Vtrans] Fall Out Boy: Live in Tokyo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14690322) by [kachesscrime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kachesscrime/pseuds/kachesscrime)




End file.
